Prospecting Tales

[Lanny in AB]

Prospecting stories, tips, a few poems on gold hunting, and all are about chasing the gold. Just fly past the poems if you'd rather read stories.

The Tale of Sourdough Sue

It’s time for the tale of Sourdough Sue,
A right salty gal she was, through and through.
She’d followed the strikes all over the west,
And chasin’ the gold was what Sue liked best.

As summer was fadin’ there came word to her
A rush was a hapnin’, for certain, for sure
Yes, gold had been found, big nuggets, coarse flakes
“I’m goin’”, said Sue, “Whatever it takes.”



It seems in Montanny they had them a strike
And word of a rush, them gold diggers like.
So Sue grabbed her gear and loaded her mules
With beans, bacon, flour and stout minin’ tools

At last she was ready to head on up north
Sue knew t’would be tough, but still she set forth.
Why, week after week it was lonely and cold,
But Sue couldn’t shake the lure of that gold.

The weather degraded the farther she went
The storms she encountered seemed not heaven sent
The trek was slow, the wind howled in the trees
The snow was so deep Sue wished she’d brung skis.



Them passes was chokin’ with oodles of snow
The air in them mountains was forty below
Now Sue weren’t no Pilgrim, but this here was tough
The sun had skedaddled, and things were plumb rough.



Sue needed a spot to ride out that storm
A shelter and fire to get herself warm
Well, off in the spindrift she spied her a light
To Sue there weren't never a more welcome sight.

A cabin it was, for certain, for sure
The warmth that it offered was likely a cure
For cold toes and fingers with needle-like pains
(Escape from that storm didn’t take many brains.)

The cabin was home to one Hook-Nosed Bob Brown
His spirits was up, for they never was down.
As looks weren’t his strong suit, Bob’d loaded his mind
With right clever sayin’s from book quotes he’d find.



Now Sue came a stumblin’ from out of that storm
And Hook-Nosed old Bobby just turned on the charm
He sat Suzie down, right close to the heat
Then went to his stable—those mules got a treat,

Bob stripped off their harness, their cold heavy packs
He rubbed them right down with dry gunnysacks
He broke out some oats, some sweet meadow hay
Then forked them some bedding where both mules could lay.

Then back to the cabin he flew off to check
How Sue was a doin’, but she’d hit the deck
A buffalo hide, she’d found near the bed
And close to the fire, she lay like the dead

Well Bob had read somewheres to let such things lie
(T’was somethin’ on canines, to wake them you’d die?)
So Bob settled in for the last of that night
While the storm shook the cabin with all of its might.

The mornin’ it came with a hushed quiet chill
The wind had died out, but the cold was there still.
Bob built up the fire, then snuck off outside
To check on those mules, who thanked him bright-eyed.

Then back to his cabin he sped to his guest
For Sue was a stirrin’, so Bob did his best.
He threw on some bacon, them beans got a stir
Whatever Bob did, he did it for her.

For up on the wall, on a peg near the fire,
A stockin' was hung! For what you enquire?
T’was Christmas of course, and Bob had desired
A gift from old Santa, just like he’d enquired.

Right here lay a woman, fresh in from the storm
And on Christmas eve, he’d made his place warm.
He’d trusted in Santa to grant him his wish
This Sourdough Sue was a right purty dish.

Well Sue and Bob bonded. His nose wasn’t right,
But Bob was so witty, it fled from Sue’s sight;
She saw there, instead of what others had seen,
The solid-gold-Bob that'd always there been.


So, this is the tale of Sourdough Sue
Who went in a rush to find gold, it’s true.
But Sue wasn't savvy to Nick’s crafty plan
To scoot her off northward to find there a man.

And just so you’re certain, so there's not a doubt
(I’m sure in your mind you’ve figured it out)
In Bob’s Christmas stocking, hung there on his wall
Was a note from old Santa explaining it all.


All the best,

Lanny

 

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[Lanny in AB]

All the best,

Lanny

 

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[pcampbell]

If i'm not mistaken that last picture is Mt. Oberlin in Glacier National Park.

If only we could prospect under that waterfall

 

[Lanny in AB]

If i'm not mistaken that last picture is Mt. Oberlin in Glacier National Park. If only we could prospect under that waterfall

You know, I believe you are right! I quickly transferred and pulled one of my mountain photos with snow on its peak. I have quite a few mountain pictures I've taken over the years while out prospecting or while on my way to one of my prospecting areas.

It would be quite the trick to prospect in a National Park, and indeed, who know's what's below that waterfall. On a connected note, in the old days there was a copper mine in that park (pre-park territory?) if I recall things correctly.

Thanks for dropping in, and all the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

Drift Mine: Part III

The next day, we hopped on the quad and went exploring. I have no idea how many unmeasured miles of logging roads there are in that region, but we certainly never came close to trying even a small portion of them. But that first day out, as we were cruising along the base of a mountain, off on the left we noticed a dark tunnel that opened into a large deposit of crisscrossing channel material.

There were at least six channels of deposition exposed in that face. The modern day placer miners had been working down the face with heavy equipment, and they’d inadvertently opened an old drift mine.

At that point in my prospecting, it was the first drift mine I’d ever seen. I’d read about them in books, but I’d never seen one before. We stopped to take a peek, and the miners saw us looking. Being the friendly types, they asked us if we’d like to take a look inside the tunnel. The problem was, the only way to get into the tunnel (as it was on that straight up face of the excavation) was to get into the bucket of an excavator, get hoisted up to the tunnel, then squirm out of the bucket to enter the tunnel!

As they’d told me it was an old drift, one hand dug in the 1800’s, I declined. Who knows, maybe it would have been safe, but the sight of twenty feet of cobbles, boulders, and assorted river run topping that tunnel made me nervous that if I made one wrong move, I’d find myself a permanent resting place. Instead, I’d made the long trip to that area to find some gold, so we headed up the trail instead, after I thanked the miners for their hospitality.

We scouted around for several days, panned some creeks, found some gold, and spent some time just getting our bearings.

We continued to meet as many locals as we could that were working along the creeks, and river, gleaning every tidbit of information we could about the area. And the more people we met, the more we learned.

Later in the week, we headed up to visit some miners that had given us an invitation to see their workings. They were using large equipment to strip off boulder clay, and large equipment to get the pay from the exposed channels to their wash-plant. The wash-plant was a big volume machine as well. Their operation was gold placering on a large scale, unlike anything I’d experienced before.

They quickly invited us to stick around once they’d put us through a few tests and realized we knew a thing or two about equipment, and that we could repair things as well. Because of their invitation, I learned about big pumps, big generators, and big machinery. It was nothing like the small-scale mining I’d done previously.

Furthermore, as soon as they found out that my partner and I were good panners, they set us up in a testing role on their claims. We had instant access to hundreds of acres of ground! Moreover, everything we found while testing their claims, we could keep. All we had to do was report where our finds were, and we had to report how much gold we’d found, whether it was found panning, sluicing, or metal detecting. And, the gold we found was glorious!

I’d never been in an area where the gold was coarse like it was there. The vast majority of the gold was rounded and bumpy, true character gold, not flat and hammered. To relate a connected story, on the river bench claim we were working, the guy that bought it was wading the shallow water across a bedrock stretch in the river, when something in the water caught his eye. He looked down and there was a fat nugget stuck in a crevice! He tried prying it out with his fingers, but it was jammed in tight and wouldn’t budge. So, he returned with a screwdriver and pried it out. I don’t remember exactly how much it weighed (I have it written down somewhere), but I know it was over an ounce. What a way to find a beautiful, sassy nugget!

In one of the excavations we were working on that bench, they broke through some old drift mines. There’s one in particular I’ll always remember, as I got to visit it up close and personal. It was on the north end of the pit. With the excavator, they’d worked down to bedrock where the formation dropped sharply and changed from smooth to fractured. To elaborate, as they worked the pit, the gold got better and better as they excavated from the front [south] to the back of the pit [north] where it dropped, before it started to rise again. In fact, just as nice nuggets and coarse gold were turning up in the sluice to make things very interesting, they hit a massive series of old drifts that stopped production. There was no more pay to work. But the drift mine on the north end where they’d ripped into the tunnel was still in good shape. I went down into the pit to check it out.

Now, I’ve done a bunch of caving and rappelling, but the tunnel workings had been there for well over a hundred years, so I barely entered the open end of the drift. I stayed at the tunnel entrance where they’d broken through. The wet lumber had changed somehow in the decades of its burial, and chunks of it broke off in my fingers kind of like it had the consistency of celery instead of wood. There was lots of seepage (from the ceiling, sides, and floor) running back into that dark tunnel, and the lagging on the ceiling was all cracked and caving. However, the drift mine was sure a cool thing to look at, and my imagination propelled me back to when the original miner was working that drift. He must have been one tough son-of-a-gun.

All of the timbers were hand-hewn. The roof was a low construction, somewhere from four to five feet high only (meaning the miner was hunched over the entire time while working), but the pillars and posts supporting the roof were large, round logs. They had to be, as that drift had been punched under about sixty feet of boulder clay, and that stuff is incredibly hard, and unimaginably heavy.

I had the green light from the miners to test whatever ground was left in the pit, as the series of tunnels they’d broken into had forced them to relocate to another location where they had a better chance of hitting undisturbed bedrock (And they sure hit it. What a bonanza they uncovered while I was there! But, that’s a whole other story.) So, they let me poke around as long as I could stay ahead of the seepage that was filling the pit.

Well, I figured if someone had gone to that amount of trouble to dig all of those drifts in that one spot, there must have been good gold there. And, what I’d seen in the sluice had sure impressed me that great character gold was there, so I decided that I’d test the floor of that drift (at the entrance). My first pan wasn’t very impressive, small flakes, and not a lot of them. Several more tests of the same material produced like results. So, I decided I’d try where some of those big pillars had been knocked over by the excavator right where they’d broke into the tunnel.

That pan of dirt took my breath away.

Nice, coarse pickers lay in the crease of the pan.

So, I became a bit of a specialist for the rest of the day. I only worked what dirt remained where those pillars had once met the wall, right around their base, and what a fun time I had. I had a great collection of pickers and fat flakes in my bottle when the darkness forced my retreat back to camp.

But, I went back the next morning as soon as it was light enough to see to have at it again. And, what I found was a pleasant mystery.

As usual, that’s a story for another day, when I’ve got more time for the telling.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Army of 1]

Great story Lanny , exciting stuff , looking forward to the next instalment ..cheers Mick

 

[Lanny in AB]

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hot-rock Insanity: Part I

“This place is insane for hot-rocks!”

That fact kept running through my brain as I looked at the long rows of huge boulders, ranging all the way from a Volkswagen Beetle to a pickup truck in size.

The site was worked with a steam shovel long decades ago. There was a significant surface run of gold on the property, with the placer gold running in size from flakes to multi-ounce nuggets. Most of the nuggets were hammered quite flat, and looking around the claim, it was easy to see why.

In the dim past during a violent ice age event, a huge glacial-melt dam broke. With the sudden release of billions of gallons of water, cataclysmic forces bore down on a significant placer deposit upslope somewhere. There was so much force in the event, that anything in the way was plowed forward. As a result, house-size boulders were mere playthings, so were any of their smaller siblings. Consequently, with the whole deposit now in motion, all of the buried gold (most-likely rounded, and possibly quite rich in character) was caught up in a massive moving ball mill of unimaginable proportions. Therefore, the nuggets and pieces were, for the most part, rolled flat, the most common characteristic on that claim, and left high and dry on the surface. This resulted because the flow was so swiftly violent that it blew the entire uprooted deposit over a large area where there were no sizable streams to redeposit the new placer event. (The exception was a small creek that did some re-depositing, but it had been worked out in the 1800’s by hand.)

Untold pounds of gold had been recovered through the steam shovel method, where the shovel went back and forth across the claim stacking boulders in long rows on either side of the excavated strips. (With so many boulders being so large, they couldn’t truck them off to remove them, so an inefficient compromise was to clear a strip, but then leave un-mined rows on every pass as a place to stack or roll the boulders they couldn’t transport out. Therefore, many nuggets and lots of finer placer were left buried in those rows. (For years, people with detectors pulled nuggets from the tops of the giant boulders in those rows, the ones the steam shovel had no power to move. The nuggets were on top because during the blowout, the gold came to rest in a haphazard fashion wherever it could, including the tops of those stone giants.)

Over the intervening years, many different placer enterprises have worked the ground, but the boulders are so prolific, that much of the area looks as it did long ago when the first steam-powered operation mined the location.

There are places on the margins of that boulder field where large earth-moving equipment has somewhat tamed portions of it, but the center of the claim remains very much the same because of the huge expense of removal or relocation.

It was into this environment that I’d cast myself. I was there because I knew nuggets were being found with detectors, and my friend that owned the claim continually issued invitations for me to work his ground. Moreover, he’d shown me many containers of sassy nuggets he’d found with his Gold Bug II.

By the way, he’s a very colorful character, and he paints the air blue whenever he’s out detecting due to all of the trouble he gets from those earlier mentioned hot-rocks.

So, the hot-rocks were unbelievable, especially if you had a VLF, and I’d tried them there before. The positive and negative varieties were a constant symphony of either painful noise mixed with positive tones. Many of the positive tones mimicked gold sounds as well, and that was maddening.

So, this time, I had the Minelab GPX 5000 with me, determined to see if I couldn’t filter the hot-rocks somewhat and tame the symphony of responses at the same time.

I have to pause here in my gold tale for a moment to help you realize that pulse machines still see hot-rocks, for even the world’s best pulse machine will still sound off on some of the nasty things. Why? It depends on the amount of metal in the rocks for one thing, and if there’s enough natural metal in any rock, the detector will “see” it regardless. And, on this particular claim, that was the issue, hot-rocks with too much metal content. In fact, some of the specimens had so much iron in them they’d jump right to the super-magnet on the end of my pick while I was investigating possible targets.

(More to follow as I find the time.)

All the best,

Lanny

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hot-rock Insanity, Part II

So, I checked with the claim owner to see where they’d been working recently. He told me to check between the rows for a spot where they’d dug out a shallow test section with the excavator.

After a bit, I found the spot.

There were boulder rows on either side of the dig. On the western end of the excavation, they’d built a ramp to get the excavator in place to test the spot they’d selected.

The excavator rested on a pad they’d built for it, with the excavation off to the south and west of the pad. The pad was made from material they’d scraped from the surrounding area between the rows, and it looked like some of it had come from the surface of the excavation as well.

There was a cabin-sized chunk of bedrock to the south and west that my buddy suggested I detect around first, as they’d found some nice nuggets there a few weeks earlier.

The day was hot, and among those rows of boulders it gets even hotter with all of that rock to reflect and trap the heat.

I worked in the shade as much as I could for there were some large poplars and pines just to the west that cast some nice shade on the east side of that cabin-sized chunk of bedrock. (That massive block of bedrock was blown out during the glacial dam burst untold eons ago, and its size impressed me with the force of the event, and the raw power it took to transport it all the way down the canyon onto the flat where I was working. It also told me why so many nuggets had been found on this claim for if the water was moving rock of that size, the gold was in transit as well. Moreover, that’s why the place was famous for surface gold, for it was if a nugget and boulder explosion had gone off and tossed gold and rock helter-skelter, then quickly moved on until the titanic event had exhausted itself farther down the slope.)

While in the shade, I noticed where my buddy and his friends had been digging. I worked at a very slow pace and investigated every break in the threshold. When I moved away from where they’d worked, I got some nice positive tones.

I dug them with some excitement, but soon found it was signals coming from small hotrocks laced with iron, the ones that jumped to the magnet on the pick, just like before. However, I was only bothered by two types of hotrocks this time (the other one was bedrock shards with a high iron content as well), instead of the legion of hotrocks that had bothered me before. The pulse detector was weeding out most of the hotrocks, thus saving me a lot of time.

I worked the area for a couple of hours, but I got skunked.

I looked down from the top of the bedrock and noticed the ramp.

To make the ramp, they’d scraped as much loose material from between the rows as they could. The more I looked at that ramp, the more I thought I should check it out.

So, I got at it and soon had the super-magnet on the end of my pick looking like a hedgehog from all of the bits of track and bucket sluffed from the excavator! But, no gold.

However, I kept at it, and soon I had a signal that was moving around in the dirt and cobbles. I ran my big magnet over the material, but there was no contact as nothing jumped from the target area onto the super-magnet. So, I pulled out my little telescoping magnet and ran it through the material just in case it was a small iron-laden hotrock. Still, nothing on that little magnet either.

As a side note, there’s lots of deer, elk, and moose hunting that occurs in the area on a regular basis. Moreover, the claim owner’s grandkids like to shoot pellet guns and 22 rifles when they visit. So, there are lots of spent bullets on the claim, and I already had a collection of more than a few. Therefore, the possibility of lead was quite realistic.

(More to follow as I find the time.)

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

Hot-rock insanity, Part III

Now, if you’ve detected for gold nuggets before, when you finally get a target that’s not a hotrock, not magnetic, and still has a sweet tone, you’ve eliminated a lot of non-nugget contenders. So, at this point in the process, I ran the edge of my coil over that dig spot to pinpoint where the signal was originating, so I could trap it in my plastic scoop.

Next, I passed the scoop under my coil to be sure I had the target in my scoop. I did not. Now, I’m not sure why, but sometimes when I’m pushing a target around that’s high in specific gravity (lead, etc.), if I’m just slightly off with the scoop when I go in to the dig hole, I miss trapping the target. It never seems to happen if it’s a piece of junk, but anything heavy seems almost to want to slide one way or the other if I’m even slightly off when I’m trying to recover it.

So, I used the edge of the coil again, moved in slower this time and scooped where I thought I’d trap the target. I passed the scoop under the coil and this time I had it.

After that, I started the process of shaking dirt onto the coil, discarding the silent dirt from the coil, shaking more dirt onto the coil, discarding it and then passing the scoop under the coil to make sure the target was still in the scoop.

The target was still in the scoop.

However, by this point, there was not a lot of dirt left in the scoop, and while shaking the scoop, the target was sluggish and didn’t want to work its way to the tip of the scoop. This was another indication that whatever the target was, it was heavy.

Through the process of elimination, I got down to the last bit of dirt and dropped it onto the coil. Whap! Then, a loud growl. I moved the dirt around with my finger until I found the target (it sure sounds off when you move it).

I picked it up and hefted it. It was heavy compared to the companion stones, unnaturally so. Furthermore, as there was a lot of clay on the ramp, all I knew was that whatever it was, it was nonmagnetic and heavy. No character or color was visible. Nonetheless, with a bit of water in the scoop, I washed off the target.

It was unmistakable.

It was a sassy gold nugget!

After all of those pesky hotrocks, all of those bits of bucket and track, all of those hours of hot, reflected sunlight, I had myself a nice nugget.

That nugget had been scraped up by the excavator when they built the ramp. Moreover, it would have been easy to give up that day, as I don’t even recall how many useless targets I dug during that session. Regardless, I stuck with it, went slow, investigated every disturbance in the threshold, and that paved the way to finding the gold.

(More to come as I find the time. There’s more to this story yet.)

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[delnorter]

Great information Lanny. I really appreciate your teaching with your past experiences.

A question: When you speak of using the "edge of the coil", are you actually turning the coil roughly 90 degrees to the ground and zeroing in on the target? Is this valid for a VLF detector such as the GB2.

Thanks Lanny,
Mike

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great information Lanny. I really appreciate your teaching with your past experiences.

A question: When you speak of using the "edge of the coil", are you actually turning the coil roughly 90 degrees to the ground and zeroing in on the target? Is this valid for a VLF detector such as the GB2.

Thanks Lanny,
Mike

Mike,

That's exactly what I'm doing, and it works on all of my pulse machines, and I believe it works on my 705 as well, but I haven't had the 705 out in a while. However, it seems to me that I used it that way last fall.

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Lanny in AB]

Grizzly Bears X 2

We were working a high bench placer in the Rocky Mountains. It was a spot on the bundle of claims we were prospecting that I had tested a couple of years earlier, as I’d seen some large boulders and cobbles that had been moved, clearly indicating that they were out of place (a different color from the surrounding rocks, no lichens, etc.) The pile of rocks was located on the opposite side of a tree-covered hump, right where the Chinese had built a series of their famous rock walls.

The walls ran in curves, at one point surrounding a massive round pile of cobbles, and I’d followed along down in the trenches enclosed by those walls to where the Chinese workings abruptly ended right in the side of the hill. Those Sourdoughs from Asia had punched themselves a drift mine right in that hillside long, long ago. The entrance was all slumped in, but the miners’ well-laid walls of carefully placed stone were still perfectly organized in their geometric curves.

As the Chinese Sourdoughs had spent so much effort in this area, I felt it was worth testing the place too. So, that’s why I’d checked out the spot over the hump from the drift mine a few years back. Over the hump, where the boulders and cobbles had been pulled out of the hillside, I’d found a nugget right on the bedrock in the clay! Because of that nugget find, we’d come back with a little backhoe and a trommel to run a larger test.

However, the dirt was mighty tough digging. Mother Nature had lain in that channel while carrying a massive run of clay, and when that clay hardens up, it’s just this side of concrete in toughness. In fact, it was so obstinate, we had to chain the backhoe to a large tree to stop it from bucking up and down, and to keep it from tipping itself into the dig hole!

We finally got enough dirt piled to start the test. We were shoveling the dirt directly into the little trommel. That homemade wonder had an old Briggs and Stratton engine on it that was running at a slow putt, putt, putt speed. The water that was washing the dirt was pressured up by nature through the use of a siphon that we’d set earlier in the season. It was a two-inch line of plastic pipe (in rolls) that we’d strung up the mountainside to catch the run of a creek that ran parallel to our operation, but we accessed it at a much higher elevation. (That whole adventure is a story for another day!) Because of our efforts, we had great water pressure without the hassle of having to start a pump every time, and without the hassle of paying for oil and gasoline!

We had a black mat in a v-shaped tray just where the first wash exited the trommel before the material then dropped into the sluice, and there was a nice catch of flakes building up on that mat.

The day was hot, as it was mid-summer, the fresh scent of pine and fir filled the air, and I’d taken off my jacket and set my defender shotgun on top of it over on the other side of the gold machine.

As I turned to reach for another shovelful of dirt from the pile, I noticed movement off to the left, for two large shapes were coming over the rows of hand-stacks, those piles left over from the 1800’s when the Old-timers hand-mined the shallow diggin’s bedrock over 150 years earlier.

I looked, and then I looked again. However, I still couldn’t believe what I saw.

Two grizzlies of almost the exact same size were strolling our way. And, when I say strolling, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were in no hurry at all, not a care in the world (a luxury you can afford when you’re at the top of the food chain), and they were investigating every single thing along the way, as they made progress closer to where we were working.

All at once, I had a giant brainwave to spook those bears right out of there! I ran quickly ran to the quad, started it, and revved that engine, nice and loud, multiple times. My brainwave led me to believe that the powerful noise of an engine would scare the bears away, of course.

What a bad brainwave that turned out to be.

Instead of heading the other direction, the twin grizzlies came closer. Then, when they were far too close, and this is when things got, and always get, downright freaky, they both stood up! Well, let me tell you, if you think grizzlies are large on all fours, wait until they stand up about twenty feet away from you.

Yikes!

I felt very small and powerless.

However dim my little brain might be, I finally realized what was happening, so I quickly shut the quad down and slowly moved off to the other side of it. With the engine shut down, the grizzlies seemed to lose interest, and they calmly moved off down the rows of hand-stacks toward the cliffs that front the river.

Now, as both of those bears were young, that’s the only reason I was lucky that day. Those curious grizzlies must have been three-year olds, ones just kicked off their momma, and they were out for a stroll to see the world. Therefore, everything was interesting to them, and when they heard an idiot revving an engine, it was brand new news to their ears, making it all that much more interesting. Furthermore, when I’d fired-up the quad, I’d hit the switch in their brains indicating that here was something on the must see list. So, they did what bears do when encountering input that’s unfamiliar, they check it out by standing up.

I can still see in brain replay those huge heads and torsos swaying side to side as they scented the air, but luckily, we were downwind of them, and luckier still, they weren’t hungry or mad that day. A true double bonus.

I learned a couple of lessons that day: always keep the shotgun close, not far off on the other side of the gold machine, and second, never assume that what might frighten or spook one animal (like a squirrel or deer) will also frighten another.

After we were sure the grizzly twins weren’t returning, and after my heart had slowed down to a gentle 200 or so beats per minute, we settled back into the routine of washing gravel. Furthermore, at the end of the day, we had a nice catch of gold in the cleanup tub.

Nevertheless, the best part of the day wasn’t the gold; it was that we didn’t wind up as bear grub!

All the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[Jeff95531]

Great story Lanny. Reminds me of a couple for sure.

We flew into our yearly fishing spot in AK looking for the usual ...24-36" rainbows and 15 pound lake trout. My good friend and I and a newbie friend of mine were the first to arrive. We got dropped off and the plane left for the next group. The pilot said he'd be back in 3 to 4 hours with the rest of our group and gear. We got camp set up on the Alagnak River at the mouth of Kukaklek Lake. With a little time to kill, we wondered up the beach on the lakes edge. The beach was literally covered with salmon bones from last years spanning of Salmon. As we ambled along, my buddy saw a very large blond grizzly coming towards us along the same beach. The bear was just as you described...strolling and investigating, just like we were. Since our walkabout was not planned, the rifle was 100 yards behind us...back in camp. We decided since the bear was only a 100 yards away, we should be getting back. As we walked, my newbie buddy nervously looked over his shoulder and said "shi*! That bear is coming for us!" By the time we turned around and looked, the bear was ambling again. As we stood our ground, the bear stopped and looked around...looking everywhere but at us. As we picked up speed, so did the bear and he was closing in faster than we could get back to camp. My buddy and I told the new guy to RUN and get the rifle (something he had NEVER held before) while we stood our ground. That worked for a moment but the bear started "jogging" our way with obvious intent. It started to look like it would be a tie between my friend arriving with the rifle and the bear upon us. Suddenly in the midst of all this, we heard the low but unmistakable drone of the 12 cylinder Beaver Dehavilland returning from Homer with the rest of our gear and crew. The pilot saw what was happening, banked the plane sharply and put the floats right over the bear. He was still running the last time I saw him...thank gawd

Another time, same location. I was sitting on a hill doing what bears do in the woods when I noticed a grizzly on the other side of the river. He was digging into the bank obviously wanting whatever little critter had gone into it's hole. Back in camp bacon and eggs were cooking away over the camp stove. (Anybody who knows these bears KNOWS this type of breakfast will bring in EVERY bear in the area and this one was no exception. I always objected to this type of breakfast FOR that very reason, but was always over ruled). I watched him sniff the air, go back to digging and then sniff the air again. With an obvious "F this" the bear pushed himself away from the hole and headed for the river bank. I had the nocos with me by now and was yelling blow by blow descriptions as he approached. The bear disappeared as it got closer to the bank and I continued to watch. Suddenly I saw a huge amount of water splayed in the air (on "our" side of the bank) as he shook off. I returned to camp and we waited.

There were LOTS of paths around and every single one of them were created by grizzlies. So we had a pretty good idea of where he would show up. Sure enough, here he comes out of the alders. Keep in mind there were NINE of us, all standing shoulder to shoulder and yelling at him to go away. He stopped and obviously didn't like what he saw and was hearing. Did it stop him? Nope. With the same look on his face that he had at the ground squirrels hole, he resumed coming into camp..now at 50 feet away. (that is an attitude you get when you're at the top of the food chain.)

My buddy aimed and fired a single but potent round over the bears head. I will NEVER forget seeing every single muscle in the big bad body quiver when that round went off. He ran a very large 1/2 circle around us and kept going at a full run till we couldn't see him anymore. Had we not had a firearm, I am certain the outcome would have been quite different.

Thanks for the memories Lanny....the best ones are when you live to talk about them!

 

[Lanny in AB]

Great story Lanny. Reminds me of a couple for sure.

We flew into our yearly fishing spot in AK looking for the usual ...24-36" rainbows and 15 pound lake trout. My good friend and I and a newbie friend of mine were the first to arrive. We got dropped off and the plane left for the next group. The pilot said he'd be back in 3 to 4 hours with the rest of our group and gear. We got camp set up on the Alagnak River at the mouth of Kukaklek Lake. With a little time to kill, we wondered up the beach on the lakes edge. The beach was literally covered with salmon bones from last years spanning of Salmon. As we ambled along, my buddy saw a very large blond grizzly coming towards us along the same beach. The bear was just as you described...strolling and investigating, just like we were. Since our walkabout was not planned, the rifle was 100 yards behind us...back in camp. We decided since the bear was only a 100 yards away, we should be getting back. As we walked, my newbie buddy nervously looked over his shoulder and said "shi*! That bear is coming for us!" By the time we turned around and looked, the bear was ambling again. As we stood our ground, the bear stopped and looked around...looking everywhere but at us. As we picked up speed, so did the bear and he was closing in faster than we could get back to camp. My buddy and I told the new guy to RUN and get the rifle (something he had NEVER held before) while we stood our ground. That worked for a moment but the bear started "jogging" our way with obvious intent. It started to look like it would be a tie between my friend arriving with the rifle and the bear upon us. Suddenly in the midst of all this, we heard the low but unmistakable drone of the 12 cylinder Beaver Dehavilland returning from Homer with the rest of our gear and crew. The pilot saw what was happening, banked the plane sharply and put the floats right over the bear. He was still running the last time I saw him...thank gawd

Another time, same location. I was sitting on a hill doing what bears do in the woods when I noticed a grizzly on the other side of the river. He was digging into the bank obviously wanting whatever little critter had gone into it's hole. Back in camp bacon and eggs were cooking away over the camp stove. (Anybody who knows these bears KNOWS this type of breakfast will bring in EVERY bear in the area and this one was no exception. I always objected to this type of breakfast FOR that very reason, but was always over ruled). I watched him sniff the air, go back to digging and then sniff the air again. With an obvious "F this" the bear pushed himself away from the hole and headed for the river bank. I had the nocos with me by now and was yelling blow by blow descriptions as he approached. The bear disappeared as it got closer to the bank and I continued to watch. Suddenly I saw a huge amount of water splayed in the air (on "our" side of the bank) as he shook off. I returned to camp and we waited.

There were LOTS of paths around and every single one of them were created by grizzlies. So we had a pretty good idea of where he would show up. Sure enough, here he comes out of the elders. Keep in mind there were NINE of us, all standing shoulder to shoulder and yelling at him to go away. He stopped and obviously didn't like what he saw and was hearing. Did it stop him? Nope. With the same look on his face that he had at the ground squirrels hole, he resumed coming into camp..now at 50 feet away. (that is an attitude you get when you're at the top of the food chain.)

My buddy aimed and fired a single but potent round over the bears head. I will NEVER forget seeing every single muscle in the big bad body quiver when that round went off. He ran a very large 1/2 circle around us and kept going at a full run till we couldn't see him anymore. Had we not had a firearm, I am certain the outcome would have been quite different.

Thanks for the memories Lanny....the best ones are when you live to talk about them!

What great stories!

They remind me of some of the other encounters I've had.

I'm glad that firing the warning round worked, as it sometimes makes things go sideways instead, but like you said, the best encounters are the ones you live to talk about.

We once had a bear stalking us, and I mean he was at it for a while. He crossed the river twice, angled up a cliff and circled around behind us, then swam the river again.

He stopped directly across from us on a cliff (we were working in a canyon) about thirty yards away in a thin stand of trees and started doing that aggressive bear stomp and sway thing, so my buddy fired a warning shot right past his head.

All he did was shake his massive head and come toward us.

Two of our buddies were already coming down the trail to meet us, and they showed up (quite excited by the unexpected gunshot) at that exact moment. Because of that, the bear slowed considerably as he didn't like the looks of four of us. As well, my one buddy picked up a long log and held it over his head, making himself look huge. The other one picked up a big slab of slate.

The entire combination of more humans and the illusion of increased size generated some kind of anti-bear magic, and he made the prudent choice to move on to other things.

Go figure.

I'm not sure what would have happened if our buddies hadn't joined us, but in that case, the gun hadn't done the trick at all.

I have another story somewhere when the gun failed to chase off another bear (it was when we spanked two rounds to either side of a huge Black bear), but I don't know if I can find it or not.

Thanks again for your stories, and all the best,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[ssdevilfish]

My only gold mining story starts out with me snooping around some old abandoned mines in the Rockies. I found some piping running down the hill and soon realized this wasn't normal. Looked in the pipe and noticed it was running with water but also had some protected electrical wire inside as well. So my interest being peaked I followed the pipe right into a meth lab. It was highly sophisticated and immediately I froze and started looking for booby traps. My military training kicked in and I noticed the little burner was on!! Someone was very nearby. Being an avid shooter I was packing my 454 casull. I slowly backed away climbed nearest hill to get reception on cell and made the call to the state police FBI and DEA. NOT THINKING THAT THESE GUYS MAY HAVE SEEN ME. They did and as soon as I turned to walk back down to meet police they opened up with shotguns. My luck was they were loaded with birdshot for some pellets actually hit me at over a 100 yards. I returned fire not at them but their truck stashed in the bushes. Only noticed it because I saw exhaust. As I blew their truck to bits the police could be heard coming up the canyon. The meth heads panicked drop their shotguns and laid down!!! All without me saying a word. Took another ten minutes (which felt like ten hours) for police to show up. All in all police found ten gallons of liquid meth and over two pounds of packaged product. They both got over ten years. After the police left hazmat moved in but before they did I grabbed as much of the dirt they had dug out of this old shaft. They had neatly piled it far from the lab. I figured hey I'm here mine as well run this thru my sluice. Found 8.5 grams. In just about two hours work and busted up a meth lab and put two badass bikers in prison. Moral of the story is gold fever will make you impervious to danger if you smell gold. Lol.

 

[Lanny in AB]

My only gold mining story starts out with me snooping around some old abandoned mines in the Rockies. I found some piping running down the hill and soon realized this wasn't normal. Looked in the pipe and noticed it was running with water but also had some protected electrical wire inside as well. So my interest being peaked I followed the pipe right into a meth lab. It was highly sophisticated and immediately I froze and started looking for booby traps. My military training kicked in and I noticed the little burner was on!! Someone was very nearby. Being an avid shooter I was packing my 454 casull. I slowly backed away climbed nearest hill to get reception on cell and made the call to the state police FBI and DEA. NOT THINKING THAT THESE GUYS MAY HAVE SEEN ME. They did and as soon as I turned to walk back down to meet police they opened up with shotguns. My luck was they were loaded with birdshot for some pellets actually hit me at over a 100 yards. I returned fire not at them but their truck stashed in the bushes. Only noticed it because I saw exhaust. As I blew their truck to bits the police could be heard coming up the canyon. The meth heads panicked drop their shotguns and laid down!!! All without me saying a word. Took another ten minutes (which felt like ten hours) for police to show up. All in all police found ten gallons of liquid meth and over two pounds of packaged product. They both got over ten years. After the police left hazmat moved in but before they did I grabbed as much of the dirt they had dug out of this old shaft. They had neatly piled it far from the lab. I figured hey I'm here mine as well run this thru my sluice. Found 8.5 grams. In just about two hours work and busted up a meth lab and put two badass bikers in prison. Moral of the story is gold fever will make you impervious to danger if you smell gold. Lol.

What a freakin' incredible story! You wrote up the great stuff with that one!!

In addition to stumbling on a meth lab, getting in a gun fight, and helping ship two bozos off to prison for a lengthy stay, you still get the gold! (I too have the 454 Casull, and it's one mean hand-cannon! If criminals don't respect that hammer of a gun, there's not much they're going to.)

Nicely done. I'm glad you added your story here, and my invitation still stands for other gold chasers (just like you) to post your prospecting tales on this thread.

All the best, and thanks again for your super story,

Lanny

http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/metal-detecting-gold/69-bedrock-gold-mysteries.html

 

[ssdevilfish]

I have never wrote that story down nor talk about much only because a few years later did I find out they were well connected bikers. On advice of some police detectives I was warned that their friends would retaliate if they found out who I was. Never happened thank god. But I did look at bikers whenever I drove around that area. It's been seven years and both guys are out there somewhere probably doing the same sick stuff. But a bonus was the gold and when I applied for concealed permit and suppressor permit and my full auto permit they approved without a hitch. So now I carry a steyr Aug full auto with suppressor and night vision and my casull 454 whenever I go up in the hills prospecting. Feels good to know that it will take the whole biker gang to take me down IF THEIR LUCKY . HOORAA. SEMPER FIDELIS BOYS.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Wow, you sure have had some adventures! I'm impressed!

 

[H&F909ORO]

Proves one thing.... Don't **** with a Gold Mining Marine.

 

[ssdevilfish]

I'm sure I'm not the only guy to run into a meth lab or pot grow while prospecting in the hills. I've heard it's way less common these days but when your out by yourself in the forests or away from the normal paths watch your backs. Carry a gun if you can and a very good communication device. If I was not trained in being calm in a tough situation then it could have got ugly. Please guys if you don't have special training NEVER EVER APPROACH A METH LAB OR POT GROW they booby trap them and you could lose your life. Just walk out the way you came and as soon as your safe RUN. CALL THE POLICE OR WHOEVER AND DONT APPROACH ANYONE IN THE FOREST YOU FEEL WEIRD ABOUT.